ere_
poor creatures, unless they were convicts or conjurors, so the
presentation is _ex hypothesi_ or _secundum hypothesin_ correct. And the
whole is firmly drawn and well, but neither gaudily nor pitchily,
coloured. It ought to be remembered that, with the possible exception of
Jane Austen, who has no peer or second among lady novelists, these
either confine themselves to representation of manners, external
character, _ton_, as was said of Fanny Burney, or else, like the other
"George" and Charlotte Bronte, endeavour to represent themselves as they
are or as they would like to be on the canvas. They never create; if
they "imitate" not in the degraded modern but the original classical
sense, and do it well, _punctum ferunt_--_suum_ if not _omne_.

[Sidenote: The story.]

_Lucrezia Floriani_ does this higher imitation well--almost, if not
quite, greatly. Had George Sand been more of a blue-stocking and of an
affected creature than she was, she might have called the book
_Anteros-Nemesis_. The heroine, by her real name Antonietta Menapace, is
the daughter of a fisherman on the Lago d'Iseo, and in her earliest
girlhood the servant-maid of a rich neighbour's wife. As her father, a
close-fisted peasant, wants her to marry a well-to-do churl of her own
rank, she elopes with her employer's son and has two children by him;
but develops a magnificent voice, with no small acting and managing
capacity. So she makes a fortune by the time she is thirty, acquiring
the two other children by two other lovers, and having so many more who
do not leave permanent memorials of their love and necessitate polygonal
rooms, that, as she observes, "she cannot count them."[186] At the
above-mentioned age, however, she becomes weary of this sort of life,
retires to her native district, buys the very house in which she had
been a servant, and with the heir of which (now dead) she had eloped,
and settles down to be a model mother, a Lady Bountiful, and a sort of
recluse. No more "love" for her. In fact, in one of the most remarkable
passages of the book she gives a story of her chief attachments, showing
that, with brief accesses of physical excitement, it has always been
_amour de tete_ and never _amour de coeur_.

Things being so, there arrive one evening, at the only inn on the lake,
a young German Prince, Karol von Roswald, and his friend the Italian
Count Salvator Albani. They are travelling for the Prince's health, he
being a sort of spoilt